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The Pure Form of Time and the Power of the False Deleuze on Temporality and Truth

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The Pure Form of Time and the Power of the False Deleuze on Temporality and Truth Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 81/2019, p. 29-51 THE PURE FORM OF TIME AND THE POWER OF THE FALSE DELEUZE ON TEMPORALITY AND TRUTH by Daniel W. Smith (Purdue University) Much of Deleuze’s work toward the end of his career was oriented around two distinct but interrelated problems: the concept of time and the concept of truth. On the one hand, Deleuze argues that a funda- mental revolution in our conception of time occurred in Kant. In antiq- uity, time had been subordinated to movement, but in Kant, time is liberated from movement and assumes an autonomy of its own. Deleuze develops this thesis most explicitly in the two volumes of Cinema, enti- tled The Movement-Image and The Time-Image.1 Although these books are contributions to film studies as well as commentaries on Bergson’s work, one of their fundamental philosophical contributions is to ana- lyze the implications of the Kantian revolution, and to thereby extend Daniel W. Smith (1958) is Professor at the Department of Philosophy of Purdue University. Recent Publications: Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2012); Pierre Klos- sowski, Living Currency, ed. Vern Cisney, Nicolae Morar, and Daniel W. Smith, with an introduc- tion by Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2017); Between Deleuze and Foucault, ed. Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail, and Daniel W. Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2016); “Deleuze, Technology, and Thought,” Tamkang Review 49 (2018): 33-52. 1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [1983], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986); Cinema 2: The Time-Image [1985], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989). One of the ­themes of these books is that the cinema, in its much shorter history, nonetheless recapitulated this philosophical revolution in the movement-time relation. doi: 10.2143/TVF.81.1.3286543 © 2019 by Tijdschrift voor Filosofie. All rights reserved. 30 Daniel W. SMITH and elaborate on the theory of time initially formulated by Deleuze in the third chapter of Difference and Repetition.2 On the other hand, this new status of time puts the concept of truth in crisis. The ancients had sought something outside of movement — something immobile or invariant — through which all movements could be measured, thereby subordinating time to the eternal, the non- temporal, an ‘originary’ time. The discovery of this originary time was at the same time the discovery of the true, since the truth was universal and necessary in all times and in all places. But the liberation of time from movement, Deleuze argues, entails a liberation of the false from the true: the form of the true gives way to the powers of the false. Just as time is freed from its subordination to movement, the false is freed from its subordination to the true (the false is no longer ‘not true’) and, like time, assumes an autonomy of its own. Although this theme is developed explicitly in a chapter of The Time-Image entitled “The Pow- ers of the False,”3 it is the analytic of concepts presented in What is Philosophy? that is Deleuze’s most direct attempt to insert the form of time into concepts.4 The aim in what follows is to analyze the complex relation between the form of time and the powers of the false, and to explore the conse- quences that Deleuze derives from their respective liberations. 1. The Pure Form of Time 1.1. Originary Time: The Ancient Coordination of Extensive and Intensive Movement The ancients subordinated the concept of time to the concept of movement. Aristotle, in the Physics, writes that time is the measure or 2 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968], trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), chap. 3, “Repetition-for-Itself,” 70-128. 3 Deleuze, “The Powers of the False,” in The Time-Image, 126-55. 4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994). THE PURE FORM OF TIME AND THE POWER OF THE FALSE 31 “number of movement.”5 But since there are a plurality of movements, there is necessarily a plurality of times.6 When a lion chases a gazelle, the different movements of each animal cannot be said to unfold in a homogenous time. Each movement has its own duration, its own artic- ulations, its own divisions and subdivisions; in subduing the gazelle, the lion incorporates the gazelle into its own movements, its own time. The ancients were thus led to ask the question: Is there something immobile or invariant, outside of movement — or at least a most perfect move- ment — through which all other movements could be measured? Is there a movement of movements in relation to which all other move- ments could be coordinated — a great celestial schema, or what Leibniz might have called a kind of ‘metaschematism’?7 This question wound up being answered in two different ways because there existed two fundamental types of movement: the extensive movements of the cos- mos and the intensive movements of the soul. In antiquity, Plato and Plotinus provided the paradigmatic conceptions of time for these two kinds of movement. In the Timaeus, for instance, Plato sought to incorporate the extensive movements of cosmos into a vision of a ‘planetarium’ comprised of eight globes, with the immobile earth at the center, surrounded by a sphere of ‘the fixed’ (the stars) turning on its axis, following a circuit that, by some calculations, was thought to last ten thousand years. It was pre- cisely this movement of movements that provided a reference point by which all other extensive movements were to be measured: an invariant, a permanence. Time, in this manner, was subordinated to eternity, to the non-temporal. In Plato’s famous formula, time was “the moving image of eternity.”8 5 Aristotle, Physics 4.11.219b5-8: “time is the number of movement in respect of before and after.” 6 The contemporary discipline of chronobiology, for example, examines the complex coexisting rhythms that are present within all organisms: heartbeats, reproductive rhythms, sleep patterns, and so on. See John D. Palmer, The Living Clock: The Orchestrator of Biological Rhythms (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002). 7 See Leibniz, Letter to Arnauld, 30 April 1687, where Leibniz faults the ancients for substituting a concept of ‘metempsychosis’ for a ‘metaschematism’ (metempsychosis pro metaschematismis). 8 Plato, Timaeus, 37d. Aristotle’s definition is similarly indexed on movement: “time is the num- ber of motion in respect of before and after” (Physics 4.11.219b2). 32 Daniel W. SMITH But Aristotle had already observed that time not only measures the extensive movements of cosmic bodies, but also the intensive movements of the soul, that is, the passage from one internal state to another. “If any movement takes place in the mind,” he wrote in the Physics, “we at once suppose that some time also has elapsed.”9 Husserl’s celebrated study of The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness would later become the classic analysis of the structure of these internal movements, such as pro- tention and retention.10 But the shift from the cosmos to the soul entails a profound change in the nature of movement, since intensive quantities are very different from extensive quantities.11 Suppose I have twenty bot- tles, each filled with a liter of water whose temperature is fifty degrees. I can pour the water of all these bottles into a separate container: though the volume of water will now be twenty liters, its temperature will remain fifty degrees. This is because volume is an extensive quantity, whereas temperature is an intensive quantity. Extensive quantities are additive, but intensive quantities are not. If they were, as Diderot quipped, you could simply add snowballs together to produce heat.12 Extensive quantity is a parts-whole relation: the parts are external to each other (the exteriority of relations), and one part does not contain another part; what contains parts is always a whole, even if this whole is itself a part in relation to another whole. Intensive quantity, by contrast, is a zero-unit relation. What distinguishes two intensive quantities is the variable distance through which one comprehends their distance from zero intensity, although these distances are non-decomposable. The distance of forty degrees from zero is ‘greater’ that the distance of thirty degrees from zero, 9 Aristotle, Physics 4.11.219a5. 10 Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. James Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1964). 11 Deleuze analyzes the distinction between extensive and intensive quantities in detail in Diffe- rence and Repetition (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), chap. 4, “The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible,” 222-61; chap. 3, “Repetition-for-Itself,” 70-128. 12 Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1914), trans. Philip Weiner (Prin- ceton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1954), 112: “Diderot used to ask jokingly how many snowballs would be required to heat an oven.” Deleuze refers to this anecdote in his seminar of 20 March 1984. Transcriptions of Deleuze’s seminars can be found at two websites: Le Voix de Deleuze, at the Univ. of Paris VIII (http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze) and WebDeleuze, a site maintained by Richard Pinhas, a musician and former student of Deleuze (www.webdeleuze.com). THE PURE FORM OF TIME AND THE POWER OF THE FALSE 33 but neither of these distances is divisible into parts.13 If time is the meas- ure of movement, then time becomes something different when it meas- ures intensive movements rather than simply extensive movements.
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